Half a year after the Supreme Court ratified the convictions for the irregular hiring of her sister-in-law at a concessionaire of the Vigo City Council, Carmela Silva will have to give explanations. The plenary session of the Pontevedra Provincial Council, which she chairs, will meet tomorrow in an extraordinary manner by court order. In December, after learning of the sentence, the PP had demanded Silva's presence to ask her to assume political responsibilities and present her resignation. The president refused to convene the plenary session and the popular appealed to the courts, which proved them right.
The one known as the 'in-law case' had its first sentence already in 2019 at the hands of the Provincial Court of Pontevedra after a complaint from the Xuntos por Galicia platform.
The court sentenced a senior official of the Vigo City Council, Francisco Javier Gutiérrez Orúe, and the head of the Imesapi concessionaire, Ramón Comesaña, for having plugged Vanesa Falque, sister-in-law of Carmela Silva, into the latter. According to the sentence, Falque received a salary for five years (in total an amount of 108,000 euros) without even going to work. The beneficiary of the post went unpunished as the crime had prescribed. Nor could it be determined which political position gave the order for the concessionaire to finger Carmela Silva's sister-in-law, the right-hand man of Vigo's socialist mayor Abel Caballero.
But the PP opposition believes that "it cannot be a coincidence" the family relationship with the president of the Provincial Council. "She is totally discredited, she has to resign," said the spokesman for the popular in the Provincial Council, Jorge Cubela, after learning of the plenary session. "The PP does not say it, common sense and ethics and morals say it," he added. The also mayor of Cerdedo-Cotobade urged Silva to tell the truth about "who is behind" the corrupt plot. Tomorrow he will ask for it again during the plenary session.
But Silva accuses the popular of overreacting and offering a "pathetic image." «The PP (...) has as its objective the destruction of the political adversary, they love blood; They are the party of blood. It is very sad, I am sorry, "said the president of the Provincial Council a day after learning that the Contentious-Administrative Court number 2 of Pontevedra ordered to convene the extraordinary plenary session. “I could repeat again that this president is irreproachable. She knows everyone. I never went to court, never in my life, not even as a witness. As already appears in the sentence. I have nothing to explain », she justified, « because there is a sentence where I was neither charged nor investigated nor was I called as a witness; It will be because there was not even an indication of my participation », she insisted. This will be, presumably, the line of argument that Silva will hold on to during the plenary session.
Beyond the irregular hiring of Silva's sister-in-law, the PP also denounces that the Vigo City Council continues to try to benefit those convicted of the corruption case. Neither the high-ranking official Gutiérrez Orúe, nor the manager of Imesapi, Ramón Comesaña, will enter prison for the time being, waiting for the central government to decide whether to grant them a pardon. The first has alleged to avoid going to jail that he was affiliated with the PSOE. In addition, Vigo associations have recognized that from the municipal socialism environment they were asked to help Orué's pardon by delivering a paper with the logo of the entity, signed and brother-in-law, without knowing what text would go in the writing.
The Vigo PP denounced this Thursday new "irregularities in the municipal awards". The popular ones charged against the intention of the Caballero executive to tender the public lighting to a company that must substitute the manager of Imesapi, the other sentenced in the sister-in-law case. The popular called it "scandalous" that the new concessionaire is forced to assume the payroll of the person who hired the relative of the provincial head, with a salary set at 90,000 euros, and that multiplies by four the assigned to the other three workers with the same category of maintainers. The municipal group of the PP announced that it will challenge this hiring before the Contracting Court.
